Should You Do a Cover Reveal?

If you’ve been on social media at all within the writing community, you know its common for an author to do a cover reveal. Sometimes, the reveal is a low-key announcement post. But others do serious marketing around the reveal and turn it into a full-blown event. They have a party, go live, and hype the cover decision on every channel they can, including their websites.

But what if all of that’s not a good idea? What if focusing so much on the cover reveal actually does the writer a disservice?

Is your cover doing the heavy lifting your book should be?

In a post on LinkedIn, author Mark McClain made an intriguing assertion. Cover reveals don’t mean more sales; your writing does:

McClain went on in the post to share the design for his own upcoming release, The King’s Ascent. He expressed his excitement and politely invited feedback.

But have we, in fact, made too much out of our cover reveals? If cover reveals don’t help sales, why do we spend so much time and energy on them? Wouldn’t we be better off putting that time and energy into the draft itself so readers would want to come back to our books over and over regardless of the covers we have?

These questions are particularly relevant to us as modern authors, as we find ourselves stretched impossibly thin with a larger range of roles to complete through the publishing process. With AI posing a real threat to our livelihoods, it’s more important than ever that we set our work apart by infusing the indescribable elements that AI can’t replicate and that make books impossible to put down. We must be discerning about what to prioritize.

A highly-promoted, expensive cover reveal won’t fix a bad book

People do judge a book by its cover. But at the end of the day, if the writing between the back and front designs stinks, they’ll put the book down. They won’t bother to offer a review that might help you sell more copies. So, to McClain’s point, there’s no substitute for investing in the writing itself. The old saying that you can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear is true. You can’t mask awful writing with a pretty picture forever. So, do your best to produce work that would sell even if wrapped in a brown paper bag. The nice window dressing afterward is just a bonus.